The Media
Lay Down Their Weapons
The Media
Lay Down Their Weapons
By Joe Bob Briggs
March 21, 2003
Normally the movie stars would wear $2 million diamond necklaces to the Oscars, but that would be inappropriate when troops are In Harm's Way.
Everyone has the right to his opinion--this is what people say when they despise your opinion--but protests should be muted when our boys are In Harm's Way.
Normally we would be interviewing militantly anti-war French intellectuals on this channel, but, you know, in harm's way.
When did the media become such WIMPS?
When a war starts, everybody is In Harm's Way. It's kind of part of the definition of the word "war."
Just a month ago I attended a conference where ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson defended the airing of footage showing American troops being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by Somali rebels. "Images like that are where policy becomes real," he said.
So what was up with the general refusal to air the footage of the five American POW's? From all accounts, and from the grainy images reproduced in the New York Daily News, this video was about a dozen times less graphic than the Mogadishu footage. Is this the same media that once aired images of a Vietnamese officer executing a civilian with a gunshot to the head? When war gets nasty and graphic and deadly, that's exactly when we need a dose of reality. And you know why?
Because people are in harm's way.
People on both sides.
Even the idea of two sides--normally held sacred by the proud American media--goes out the window in these modern lopsided wars of a technological army swooping down on an army of the 19th century. The press becomes nationalistic, jingoistic and blind to the point of view of "the enemy." To a real journalist, there would be no enemy, only combatants.
Once again, repeating the whole Afghanistan experience, we have to go to the foreign press for information. (Interestingly, the British newspapers apparently don't have this "in harm's way" moratorium on bad news, even though their soldiers are just as involved as our own.) Al-Jazeera has footage, our own networks do not. European and Arab journalists hit the ground running in Baghdad, toting up the civilian dead--our own journalists do not.
Even within the relatively safe confines of New York City, the press seems to work for the war information ministry. Widely covered on Saturday was a pro-war demonstration on Times Square. There were 1,500 people there, and it was more ballyhooed than the previous demonstration of 200,000 people against the war.
The tough anti-U.S. speeches of Putin and Chirac are not aired. The White House is not pressed on the oil issue. (Since most of the world believes we're engaged in an oil grab, one way to rehabilitate our image would be to bar American oil companies from participating in post-war contracts. Other countries have already called for this.)
And every day, bleating from CNN, Fox, MSNBC and all the other networks, are sentimental features about "family" (our own families, of course, never Iraqi families) and the agony of the professional soldier's loved ones. Yet these are men and women who have signed up for combat duty, all volunteers, and it's not clear to me how they're so different from families of, say, Vietnam soldiers, or those who fought in Korea.
The other strange thread running through American coverage is the certain assumption that there will be democracy in Iraq. No one has considered that the Iraqis might not cotton to democracy. They might prefer a strongman system. They wouldn't be the first culture to do so. Giving them self-determination could result in several forms of government, including an Islamic theocracy or some version of the Late Roman style dictatorship they have today.
There was a time when our newspapers and networks were neither pro-war nor anti-war, neither pro-America nor anti- America, neither overly sentimental nor overly hard-boiled. The phrase "yellow journalism" itself dates from an era when a newspaper publisher agitated for war and then crusaded for the troops who fought it. For years it was used as a slur. The press considered it a dark forgotten chapter in its otherwise illustrious history.
That was, of course, before we all landed In Harm's Way--of the media's pandering.
Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.
© 2003 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved